While its
board struggles to find a permanent CEO, Twitter continues to shuffle its executive ranks.
After overseeing developer products for more than a year, Jeff Seibert has been put in charge of consumer
products, Twitter confirmed on Thursday.
The change -- first reported by Re/code -- puts Seibert in the difficult position of improving what has long been an area of weakness for
Twitter.
Twitter SVP Kevin Weil will continue to head all products -- including ad products, developer products, Vine and Periscope -- a Twitter spokesperson confirmed.
Reporting to
Weil, however, Seibert will be running the core Twitter product. Filling in for Seibert as head of developer products is Rich Paret, Twitter’s existing senior director of engineering.
Twitter’s current leadership is making the changes knowing full well that their next CEO could have something entirely different in mind.
The social giant’s board was scheduled
to meet at some point, on Thursday, to discuss its CEO search, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek.
To date, the search for Twitter’s next leader has not been going
well. Recently, a list of outside candidates produced by an independent consultancy reportedly failed to impress anyone inside the company.
Twitter also continues to lose talent to rivals in
the technology space. Among other defectors, Todd Jackson recently left his position as director of product management at Twitter. Jackson left for file hosting service Dropbox as vice president of
product.
Twitter’s problems -- which took down CEO Dick Costolo, this summer -- go beyond matters of product development.
During the second quarter, the company earned an
adjusted $0.07 per share on revenue of $502 million -- up 61% year-over-year, and above the previously forecast range of $470 million to $485 million.
Yet, during the period, Twitter added
just 2 million new core users -- a figure that interim CEO Jack Dorsey called “unacceptable” on an earnings call, in late July.
“In order to realize Twitter’s full
potential, we must improve in three key areas: ensure more disciplined execution, simplify our service to deliver Twitter's value faster, and better communicate that value,” Dorsey said at the
time.
The vast majority of monthly active users added in the second quarter on a sequential basis came from “SMS Fast Followers.” Excluding that subset, MAUs were 304 million for
the second quarter -- up only 12% year-over-year.